How to Build a Tyranny Part two: The Welfare State

Daniel Jupp

Along with the growth of internationalism and the fixed idea that nation states had failed and that nationalism was inherently evil, World War Two provided an impetus to another development that would be key to the growth of modern tyrannies.

For if the State had failed in a moral sense through nationalism, it needed now to assert a new moral purpose. Pride in identity and the protection of specific peoples was now associated with Nazism. What, then, was the nation state really for? What was its purpose, it’s raison d‘etre, and it’s excuse for the exercise of tax raising powers and all the other functions the State had assumed?
The answer, of course, the new moral purpose, was the Welfare State, formerly adopted in Britain through the creation of the NHS in 1948. The NHS would balloon into one of the most expensive and bloated bureaucracies on the planet, and would accompany vast expenditure with mixed or even declining results in terms of fulfilling its alleged purpose of providing efficient and life saving healthcare. Britain’s NHS offered socialism in action, and the field of action was the most emotive one there is, that of life,birth, and death. It would also be the part of the welfare system that few would ever dare challenge, given that it’s remit was saving lives. The increasingly obvious fact that the NHS for many people provided a worse medical care system than what went before is one that many British citizens are still emotionally unable to face.
Welfare, though, was also more than just ‘free’ healthcare. Welfare was also provision of payments to the unemployed, and payments to the injured, and support to the disabled, the crippled and the blind. It was government subsuming the functions of charity, and the duties once largely undertaken not by the largesse of the State but by the munificence of individual benefactors and the administrative support of the Church.

All of this was sold as something pre-earned by the sacrifices made during World War Two, with apparently little or no concern given as to how it would sustain itself in the future, how it might be exploited in the future, and how it might expand far beyond the means originally set aside for funding it. It was a huge blank cheque bankrupt nations wrote to a populace hungering for definable rewards from definite wounds, and a massive assertion of a new moral purpose to the nation state.
The more bankrupt the nation was, the more appealing this welfarism was. A Britain with barely a penny in the coffers adopted it, as too in various forms did the shattered nations of Europe. For those who think an expensive healthcare system indicated American rejection of this socialist model of State generosity, the reality was that US welfare also exploded in the post war era. In the US, though, it was tied to internal racial issues that did not then exist in places like Britain. The welfare tap was turned on in the US too, but it took time to get around to calls for universal healthcare.
It was a tap, really, that had already been opened. What else was the Roosevelt New Deal at the culmination of the Great Depression, but the same alliance between massive State spending and charitable aims, all justified by the Keynesian economic theory that assumed that large State spending equalled economy-buildin

g good sense, sure to result in recovery from downturns, renewed confidence, and a boom that swiftly repays the money already spent.
Keynesian economics can be reduced to the belief that State largesse builds economic success, and it was Keynesian economics that dominated State spending in the postwar era just as it was liberal internationalis m that dominated foreign policy. In both cases national self interest was either embarrassingly outdated (potentially vile) or actually served best simply by spending more.
US dedication to the socialist style Big Project answers of Keynesian economics and the moral seduction of government assuming a charitable function was in fact greater than that of European nations. It just didn’t manifest entirely at home. One stream of it did, and was called affirmative action. Racial division would be healed by hosing trillions of dollars at black communities. But the other stream of it never went to any American demographic at all, but instead into rebuilding nations US military might had just reduced to rubble. The Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe should be properly viewed as the US becoming a welfare state. Just a welfare state that was giving that welfare to entire other nations.
The US spent money bombing nations into rubble. Then it spent money building those nations back up again. If it seems somewhat perverse and expensive, it’s because it was. But really it only repeated on a national level what liberal policies in a welfare state that is also a consumer society do to individuals. The individual is bombarded with all sorts of things that harm them, especially by the removal of the protective layer of conservatism and traditionalism and the tendency of those to shield individuals from poor choices. Rather, the individual is allowed the poor choice, or even pushed towards the poor choice, whilst an entire second tranche of spending is built around reactions to that poor choice.
We set up the kind of society in which people want to take drugs, for example, and then we fund drug rehabilitation centres. Like Germany or Japan during and after World War Two, the individual is first bombed, then rebuilt. Only it turns out that mere money rebuilds individuals far less effectively than it rebuilds nations. A bombed building is easier to recover than a broken mind.
Welfarism, popular everywhere in the West as the reward for and moral purpose after World War Two, had several devastating consequences. It has a pernicious effect on individuals and on whole demographics. Nothing has been more damaging to black pride, independence, morals and life chances in the US, for example, than the fact that black communities were targeted more than any other for the largesse of welfarism. But the same effects can be seen in white working class communities subject to the same external ‘help’. It’s been quite convincingly argued that the same effects derive from international aid programmes too, which are also a form of welfarism that exploded after World War Two.
Whether it is an individual or a community the continual supply of money for nothing does more harm than good. It encourages fathers to abandon their children, for instance, and mothers to have children not out of the ultimate expression of love but for the provision of welfare payments. It turns proud, independent minded working class communities into a listless, feckless, antisocial underclass. It traps individuals, nations and communities in dependency, and teaches them that the worst behaviours are the most rewarded ones.
The old saying "whom the gods wish to destroy they first drive mad” can be reformulated for this effect of the Welfare State. "Whom the powerful wish to ruin, they first give welfare”. All human agency, all individual competency or desire to acquire competency, all self sufficiency, is denied by the Welfare State. Whilst a Good Samaritan might give brief aid, only a Cruel Fool gives continual aid.
That, though, is not the end of the perniciousness of welfare. For welfare has to be administered. Welfare has to be judged, and welfare requires it’s clerks and tallies, it’s agents and operatives. In other words the Welfare State is a state that grows. It requires more bureaucracy. For every penny of help that gets into the hand of some trembling dependent, ten or twenty times that amount goes into the pockets of administrators and overseers. Welfarism feeds the growth of the State from a responsible and limited government with a few key duties, to a bloated behemoth demanding ever greater spending in every successive budget.
A disastrous circle of self destruction ensues. Given welfare, dependents demand more welfare, and so politicians know that a large crop of votes are harvested by meeting ever more ridiculous demands for welfare. If they resist this, they are ‘uncaring’ and ‘callous’. If they ever seek to reduce the size or spending of government once welfare has been initiated, they are baby killers and cripple kickers. The most feckless GOVERNMENT is rewarded, as well as the most feckless individuals. Spending more becomes doing good, regardless of whether any improvements result.
The nation becomes addicted to welfare, no matter how poisonous the results. This is why even conservative parties soon endorse ruinous spending levels. And this in turn encourages and requires the next folly-the accumulation of massive debt. The welfare State is the gateway drug to national debt.
Economically ruinous, for sure, but why do I also see welfare as the second great link to modern tyranny? Precisely because it both expands the State and rewards the governments which are most feckless. Governments which are elected to expand the State because the expansion of the State is confused with kindness, are governments which will keep expanding until they cannot be anything OTHER than a tyranny. Populations which confer upon the State sole responsibility for their lives via welfare, are populations that are perfectly happy to confer their liberty and freedom to the State as well. And that of others. So long as the tap of welfare keeps flowing, the spring of liberty can dry up and nobody cares.'

Tim adds:

A couple of points.

First, we became the very thing we fought against in WWII. The Nazis and the Fascists both had big, intrusive welfare states. Certainly Hitler's Third Reich offered very generous welfare programs, in keeping with the "Socialist" in their name.

According to Götz Aly's Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State the Nazis bribed the German People with a generous welfare system.

From the article:

While underemphasized by modern historians, this socialism was stressed in many contemporaneous accounts of fascism, especially by libertarian thinkers. F.A. Hayek famously dedicated The Road to Serfdomto "the socialists of all parties"—that is, Labourites, Bolsheviks, and National Socialists. "It was the union of the anti-capitalist forces of the right and the left, the fusion of radical and conservative socialism," Hayek wrote, "which drove out from Germany everything that was liberal." Ludwig von Mises agreed, arguing in 1944 that "both Russia and Germany are right in calling their systems socialist."

The Nazis themselves regarded the left-right convergence as integral to understanding fascism. Adolf Eichmann viewed National Socialism and communism as "quasi-siblings," explaining in his memoirs that he "inclined towards the left and emphasized socialist aspects every bit as much as nationalist ones." As late as 1944, Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels publicly celebrated "our socialism," reminding his war-weary subjects that Germany "alone [has] the best social welfare measures." Contrast this, he advised, with the Jews, who were the very "incarnation of capitalism."

Using a farrago of previously unpublished statistics, Aly describes in detail a social system larded with benefits —open only to Aryan comrades, naturally. To "achieve a truly socialist division of personal assets," he writes, Hitler implemented a variety of interventionist economic policies, including price and rent controls, exorbitant corporate taxes, frequent "polemics against landlords," subsidies to German farmers as protection "against the vagaries of weather and the world market," and harsh taxes on capital gains, which Hitler himself had denounced as "effortless income."

Aly demonstrates convincingly that Nazi "domestic policies were remarkably friendly toward the German lower classes, soaking the wealthy and redistributing the burdens of wartime." And with fresh memories of Weimer inflation, "transferring the tax burden to corporations earned the leadership in Berlin considerable political capital, as the government keenly registered."

For instance, at the outset of war Nazi economists established a "wartime tax of 50 percent on all wages" that applied only to the wealthiest Germans. In the end, Aly writes, "only 4 percent of the population paid the full 50 percent surcharge." In occupied Holland, administrators dramatically raised taxes to fund an "anti-Bolshevik campaign," while some Dutch companies paid upward of 112 percent of profits in tax''

End excerpt.

Mussolini and the Fascists also offered a generous welfare system.

So the allies adopted the very system they destroyed in WWII.

It was argued we had to do this to avoid a Communist revolution, I might add.

BTW the idiots at the Washington Post argue that to avoid "extremism" we need a stronger welfare state. But history says the exact opposite.

I agree; the money handed out is ultimately addictive and destructive. I wrote about how it has ruined lives and communities at Orthodoxy Today.

I also wrote about how this is not moral at American Thinker. Welfare steals dignity, it steals independence, and it makes people poor and weak.

Welfare is an infestation, like termites eating away at your home. It drains the whole nation of wealth and initiative. It helps concentrate wealth into the hands of those already quite wealthy as it knocks the middle class slowly, painfully, into the system. And it makes the public slaves who must beg for their daily bread.

Rome had such a system shortly before it collapsed.

And that is precisely what is going to happen to the welfare-laden West.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 10:28 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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